Mobile electronic devices such as cellular phones, smart phones, personal digital assistants (PDAs), mobile gaming devices, handheld computers, and similar devices typically include a screen for displaying information and a keypad for entering information. Such devices will be referred to herein as handsets. The keypad on a handset might include one or more buttons that are labeled with characters or images that indicate the function that will be performed if a button is pressed.
The keypad might also include one or more ‘soft’ buttons. A soft button is a button that has no permanently assigned function but can perform different tasks depending on the context that is currently active on the handset. A soft button typically has no label on the button itself. Instead, the function that the soft button performs might be indicated by a label that appears above the soft button on the display screen. For example, the word ‘menu’ might appear in the lower left portion of the display screen directly above a soft button. Pressing the soft button might cause a menu to appear on the display screen. After the menu appears, a different word might appear in the position where the word ‘menu’ previously appeared. Pressing the soft button again might cause an action that is associated with this different word.